News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on A case study of Toyota unintended acceleration and software safety (2014) [pdf]. Parent comment

Re:A case study of Toyota unintended acceleration and softwa... by jacquesm on Monday May 02, 2022 @12:28PM (#31237306)
Indeed, spaghetti code is bad, but spaghetti data manipulated by spaghetti code is orders of magnitude worse.

The thing that I never got is why there are plenty of high level languages that have 'global' more or less as the default. This is asking for trouble. Side effects should be very carefully introduced and reasoned about and kept to an absolute minimum, not be the default sauce to sprinkle across your codebase, the possible number of states increases very rapidly if you do that.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:A case study of Toyota unintended acceleration and softwa... by kevin_thibedeau on Tuesday May 03, 2022 @12:06AM (#31244485)
Dynamic allocation is generally forbidden in this application so all system state has to be in global or static variables. Otherwise you'd have to invest in formal analysis tools to prove that memory won't be exhausted.
[ Parent | on HN ]